Data-Driven Policymaking? In Your Dreams
Gathering data to make informed decisions is one thing, using it is another. With computing power so inexpensive and accessible, with so much public and private sector pressure to collect information, practitioners and policymakers have at their fingertips real-time data on everything important. Consider the economy.
Writing in the New Yorker, James Surowiecki (see below) points out that
”[O]ur picture of the economy is more detailed and sophisticated than ever, and that makes it easier for businesses and the government to react quickly to changes in the economy.”
Surowiecki describes the Billion Prices Project designed by two economists that identifies Web-based prices for online goods—more than 500,000 daily or five times the number that federal agencies gather—to tell what is happening now with prices, not a month later as U.S. data do. For those who worry about inflation, the Billion Prices Project noted businesses cutting prices months before government numbers did. Such a project, then,
